Why is the burning of fossil fuels so harmful to the environment?

Answer 1

Because it adds carbon dioxide (CO2) to the earth's atmosphere without removing any. And the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is highly influential on earth's climate as scientists have learned when studying earlier episodes of warming and cooling over the past 650,000 years.

Our planet has a very ingenious and natural system of controlling CO2: its called the Carbon Cycle. In the Carbon Cycle natural elements like vegetation, soil and oceans not only releases lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, they also re-capture it from the atmosphere thereby creating a balance. These natural elements are called Carbon Sinks.

The problem is that we humans, by burning fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas and coal, only add CO2 to the atmosphere, we do not remove any. While the natural Carbon Cycle is able to capture some of man-made CO2 (about 40% at present), it cannot capture all and the remaining 60% stays in the earth's atmosphere. This natural capacity to remove man-made CO2 is also negatively affected by deforestation as the trees and plants removed by humans will no longer be able to capture both natural- as man-made CO2, thereby further increasing the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Another related and direct environmental problem is the acidification of our oceans. Oceans are an important carbon sink and as they store more man-made CO2, their water becomes more acid which in turn will have consequences for sea-life and the food-chain.

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